Channels

Services

XenServer 6 released

Citrix has announced the release of version 6 of its Xen-based virtualisation solution. The basic product continues to be available free of charge; only the components that are based on it are subject to a fee. The new version offers various improvements: based on version 4.1 of the hypervisor, it supports more CPUs and memory per VM and offers CPU pools. In desktop virtualisation environments, GPUs can be managed and allocated in a pool and then assigned to a VM. Administrative improvements include the integration in Microsoft's System Center 2012, which is still in beta state.

In XenServer 6, Open vSwitch has replaced the Linux bridging code that was the previous default component for networking virtual machines. The software is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Its capabilities include the ability to keep cross-server VMs within a logical network and the option to utilise the virtualisation support on network cards; A paper by the switch developers explains the details.